derangedhyena reblogged
New zine that's free for anyone to print and distribute! Read the whole thing at newlevant.com/COVIDzine or in the rest of this post.
derangedhyena reblogged
“ai alignment is like if the first time you made an operating system you absolutely had to get computer security 100% right or it would destroy the world”
-eliezer yudkowsky
“[barges into cafeteria][knocks over your table and spills your ketchup on you]hey yo what’s up? just designing the first artificial general superintelligence. no our UI isn’t secure lmao, it spills data all over the place. I mean everyone else’s website is like that too what’s the big deal? yes I know people have been working on computer security for many decades, so what, it’s dumb shit for nerds. i will make a friendly ai and it will be so friendly it won’t even care that missingno lives in it and hands people random segments of its proprietary source code. it’s cool, dude [hits biblically accurate bong]”
-sam altman
derangedhyena reblogged
Free Resources I Made for Nonfiction Book Writers - $$$
If you're writing a nonfiction, non-memoir book, you're welcome to join my free monthly video chat group Authors of Nonfiction Books in Progress (ANBIP.) If you join you'll get the recap emails and the invites to meetings, but if you don't like meetings, then just enjoy the emails. Note that it's sort of a professional group so we talk about book writing as more of a job than some universal higher calling or whatever.
Through that, I've had a few people ask me for some of the following documents in this journey, so I decided, why not just make a copy for sharing so that anyone can find them, instead of just people who email me? Feel free to use these as samples, share them, whatever. But first:
What I wish I had known before the book: While I'm here, before you start your book proposal, I learned too late that you can get paid $80,000 to write one at a journalism fellowship! People do that at the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship, The Scripps Fellowship at the Center for Environmental Journalism, and probably the other Knight Journalism fellowships that I haven't looked into. So, keep your ears open for fellowships if you're thinking of starting a nonfiction book proposal.
To the resources...
Results from my agent search Note: most people suggest Publisher's Marketplace, so, even though I didn't like my results from looking there, there is surely a reason everyone else does.
My Book Proposal & how I contacted the agent Result: contract with MIT Press to write a book about dead animals and $50,000 advance.
My Proposal for the Sloan Grant Result: I got $56,053 for the book Carcass. Also, at least two other people in my group got the grant, and one mentioned that she never would have known about it if it weren't for ANBIP, nor would she have applied!
List of suggested grants to apply to Note: most of these book grants--and most legit ones in the world--require a traditional contract. I find a lot of "prizes" for people without trad contracts are not grants at all, but an effort to get you to think you "won" what is, in effect, a contract. That's fine if the contract is fine, but don't let them stroke your ego with the words "you won" if you think you could get a better contract elsewhere. A grant is more like free money.
I also got $500 and some free resources--and miiiiight get some more money in the future?--from a program called Investing in Wyoming's Creative Economy, so, maybe your state has something similar. IWCE is brand new (started in 2023) so we'll see if it even continues on. MANY funding opportunities only exist for a few years before they run out.
How I found Science Advisors & how I described their task Note: I really just made this up, as with the contract with the fact-checker. I'm just some person and I'm only giving these to you because I couldn't find anyone else's that may have been done better! Make a copy, read through it carefully, and make all the changes you need to yours. Or if you already have a better one to look to, send it to me and LMK if I can send it to my colleagues at ANBIP!
Spreadsheet National Park Artists in Residences Applications Note: I have never got any of these, and most don't pay or work well for writers, TBH. But I know a science writer who did get one. Also, I only included the ones I liked in this spreadsheet and left out the historic parks. Here's a map of more and the National Park Arts Foundation. I only apply to free ones because I noticed that one residency said they got 800 applications and the fee was $120, which, mathematically, is like paying $96,000 to do it (and that one paid $4,000 to the winner.) Also: state parks and BLM land have Artist in Residence programs!
That's all for now! If you found this helpful, just pay it forward by being open with your experience for the next people who ask you.
PS. My next task is finding events to hire me to do talks about the topic of my book, which is dead animals. I know some authors make plenty of money on speaker fees after their book is launched! But I'm struggling to find events/places to speak because I mostly only want to go places where I am paid, but I also worry about a conflict of interest if I'm paid by organizations I've covered--or even, orgs that promote or protest anything that I've covered in general! I don't want to be a PETA-funded journalist or a Safari Club International-funded journalist either. If you have experience with setting up a book tour where you profited financially and were journalistically clear, I'd love to hear your story!
derangedhyena reblogged
Character who got killed by their lover because said lover was stuck in a time loop and they were just slowly losing their mind and during the last time loop- unknowningly to them- they completely lost it and stabbed PC because hey, it's fine, you ll come back anyway, you always do, it keeps happening- ah fuck, shit, it didn't this time, we stopped the loop but you're my personal cost in this, let me bring you back, surely you can forgive me, why are you leaving, why are you afraid of me, what do you mean im a different person-
derangedhyena reblogged
important reminder for people who menstruate:
if your cramps are so painful you can't do daily tasks, take care of yourself or get out of bed. if you pass out or vomit from cramps. if you can't walk or stand up properly from cramps. if you need to take pain medicine when you get cramps or else you will get sick, pass out, whatever.
seek medical help. people talk about how painful cramps are, and it's true, but there's a level of pain that simply isn't normal, and you need to get it checked
signed: someone who was recently diagnosed with endometriosis
Also want to add that if you’re also experiencing lots of pain outside of your period, definitely get that checked as well! You should NOT be having a ton of pain during sex, pain going to the bathroom, pain from physical activity, or pain just from sitting or sneezing…
We hear a lot about how endo = bad period cramps, but it’s important to note that there are symptoms throughout your cycle (pelvic pain, bloating and GI symptoms, nausea, fatigue).
And if it’s not endo it’s good to learn what it could be instead (pelvic inflammatory disease, PCOS/ovarian cysts, etc.).
extra emphasis on all of the above things can be done I used to lay on the floor sobbing due to how excruciating the pain was and my mom basically told me to get over it, so
(I don't have any formal reproductive system diagnosis besides a history of extreme problems and "wow, that's not right", but there probably is a named thing or three. I'm just old and grumpy and it all can honestly fuck off)
Today's issue of Realistic Pessimism: In the entire history of our capitalist society, basically nothing has ever changed for the better absent legislative force and/or massive enough boycotts/outcry to prompt a change in a company or industry's behavior. We are not going to see the latter for AI. I've said it before and I'll say it again, that Pandora's Box has been opened. Certain very, very small groups have been concerned about this for a long time. Nobody listens to small groups*. Creatives as a whole aren't a large enough group to be meaningfully listened to either. Please refer to the frightening history of orphan works legislation and the abysmal state of copyright law(s) in general. The US is a political dumpster fire being run by people who have no idea what technology can do, nevermind is doing. I do not see how we will get from laws that still haven't really caught up to the internet existing, to laws that will help creatives. Worse: that help is likely never coming in this current system. Big corporations stand to gain from AI - these same corporations have shaped copyright into the hostile (and for small/medium creators, unapproachable) mess it is. I personally do not think there is any value in wasting one's time, energy, or spoons raging at the existence of AI tools and what they entail. I think that effort would be better spent in understanding what they do, how they work, and how you can utilize them. No, I am not advocating for everyone to run around AI generating everything. No, I am not saying if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. I am saying: we need people - a LOT of people - who are educated on the topic and can clearly articulate their thoughts about the technology. Its issues, its potential applications, suggested solutions, etc. You need to know how it works, what it does, and what its limitations are (and aren't) to speak to these things. Know what AI does so you can clearly understand what YOU offer that's better. What do YOU do that it can't? What can IT do that YOU can't? Especially in the realm of employment, what can it help you do better or faster? Whether one likes it or not, I think this is going to start mattering more than people realise.
derangedhyena reblogged
Anonymous asked:
Hey! Longtime follower and fan of your art! Just making sure your aware of tumblr's new agreement with Midjourney and OpenAI...so you'll wanna go hop into your setting and toggle things so they can't train on your art. Wishing you a better day after this bad news, tho! ☺️
Hi, thank you!
Have already done the toggle but realistically I want you folks to understand something:
If you have anything online you should be assuming that is training data, regardless of what a website tells you. We half-acknowledge it every time someone says 'I bet the toggle doesn't do anything'. The toggle here, or the one on squarespace, or anywhere else, is a *request* to be excluded, and the black box nature of AI data harvesting is it would be very difficult to legally prove they disregarded the request. Maybe they decide to be above board and honor it, and then a crawler unaffiliated with MJ or OA ignore that tickbox and take for themselves.
Please consider every time you upload something anywhere that holds that data unencrypted, it is training data, whether or not anyone has been 'generous' enough to notify you.
Unfortunately I remain of the opinion that art exists to be a shared experience, so here I am, still postin'.
Be safe out there.
derangedhyena reblogged
They are already selling data to midjourney, and it's very likely your work is already being used to train their models because you have to OPT OUT of this, not opt in. Very scummy of them to roll this out unannounced.
Account Settings -> Visibility to find the setting on mobile
They also quickly put out a long “tumblr is dedicated to protecting the data of its users blah blah blah” post. Then why isn’t the setting to opt out turned on by default then hm???
(It’s because nobody would turn it off obviously but still. Ultra scummy)
they literally did auto opt-out anyone whose blog was already set to discourage crawling "Please note: If you’ve already chosen to discourage search crawling of your blog in your settings, we’ve automatically enabled the “Prevent third-party sharing” option." If you weren't already doing that then it's amazingly difficult to take one's complaints about content being harvested seriously
The complaints are "it should be opt-in by default for everyone" and "we should have been told about this option sooner."
Like dA, tumblr is attempting to create a framework for fencing off materials from the greedy-gimme that is the internet at large. And like with dA, people are wigging out about it en masse.
For a very long time, blogs have had the option to discourage bot crawling.
If you've had that option enabled, then this new option was automatically enabled:
For anyone who has clearly indicated they did not want their blog content crawled, tumblr made the very reasonable assumption they would also not like the above option enabled either. If search engines are crawling one's material it is already being shared. It is already made widely available. There is and has been nothing stopping anything from harvesting this material en masse. If one knew this, and a) had the setting enabled, then "prevent third party sharing" was auto-enabled and there is nothing to complain about or b) did not have the setting enabled, then what exactly is the complaint? If one did not know this... would it not be more a time to reflect on the larger issues at hand and learn how available tools can be better utilized, than to yell at tumblr for trying to *do* something about the problem? At the rate many creative folk complain about any and all attempts to address the (admittedly massive) problem(s), people/companies are going to be wildly disincentivized to actually do anything about it. Lose/lose situations all around.
Hence:
derangedhyena reblogged
They are already selling data to midjourney, and it's very likely your work is already being used to train their models because you have to OPT OUT of this, not opt in. Very scummy of them to roll this out unannounced.
Account Settings -> Visibility to find the setting on mobile
They also quickly put out a long “tumblr is dedicated to protecting the data of its users blah blah blah” post. Then why isn’t the setting to opt out turned on by default then hm???
(It’s because nobody would turn it off obviously but still. Ultra scummy)
they literally did auto opt-out anyone whose blog was already set to discourage crawling "Please note: If you’ve already chosen to discourage search crawling of your blog in your settings, we’ve automatically enabled the “Prevent third-party sharing” option." If you weren't already doing that then it's amazingly difficult to take one's complaints about content being harvested seriously
derangedhyena reblogged
i feel quite bad for people who are convinced nightshade and glaze are going to fix the balance of power in the art world because it really won't. they're quite useless and extremely easily circumvented, but trying to tell anyone this results in you getting shouted down. buddy i wish it worked too!
sure, here's 5 reasons.
#1 - they're designed for very specific models of ai. by the time they could even hypothetically poison enough of the world's images to affect ais in any meaningful sense the architecture will have changed. it's not fast enough
#2 - it only prevents people training things like LORAs or fine-tuning on a specific artist's output and does nothing to affect image-to-image (the only thing that could realistically be qualified as plagiarism in any sense) or image prompting (i've tried this one myself to win an argument on twitter but they told me to kill myself).
#3 - image ais are no longer trained by vacuuming up as many images as possible and training on the resultant sludge - that's 2021-tier. two years in ai research is a LOT of time and by the time enough data gets poisoned to hypothetically matter it'll be years down the road. the emphasis in ai research nowadays is increasing the quality of the caption data as well as developing models that function more efficiently off fewer images, which is not something that many anti-ai people don't know because they keep a concerted effort to not stay up to date.
#4 - the image ais like stable diffusion are already trained. as that one post about vegan chicken nuggets said, the chicken is already in the nugget. you can't un-train the ai and then force the poisoned data back in. if you poison enough data for it to matter ai art people will just go back to earlier models (or wait until the architecture changes enough for it to not matter, see point #1). anyone selling you 'algorithmic disgorgement' has no idea what they're talking about and fundamentally doesn't understand the FOSS ecosystem.
#5 - the most damning is that nightshade and glaze can both be trivially defeated by applying a 1% gaussian blur to your image, which destroys the perturbations required to poison the data.
thanks for asking
side note:
i, personally, think nightshade poisoned pictures look cool and are more aesthetically pleasing to me than midjourney or novelai slop.
An additional point my colleague-in-ai and overall lovely human Max Woolf raised (he helped me make drilbot! Say hi);
Okay that’s all! Cheers
Even if you don't like generative models, this blog post is an amazing read. It also explains why Glaze and Nightshade aren't going to work on "local" models. People aren't training generative image models on their own personal computer. They're using Stable Diffusion and "fine tuning" it with LoRA (the math/stats people always make fun of CS people's sexy names, but I like this one). The UChicago people replied to a Twitter thread confirming that they didn't/don't expect Nightshade to work for LoRAs (someone put a screenshot somewhere else in the notes, and I didn't think to grab it. Maybe it was OP?).
If you know an image has had both or either applied, you can basically tell the model that the image is wrong and improve the model using the borked pictures. I think it is really cool that Max Woolf figured out how to do this in this particular case, but I think it should be made clear to non-ML people that augmenting/perturbing data is like... a foundational strategy to improving a model. Sometimes the augmentations are as simple as up-sampling classes that are underrepresented, but the popular ML libraries actually include functions to bork images to train image classifiers on (not in the same way as Glaze or Nightshade, but still).
derangedhyena reblogged
Birthday Phone Animal
The Birthday Phone Animal comes to those deep in grieving on their birthday, and follows them around. Opening its mouth as if to bleat, the tinny sound of a phone ringing comes out. if you pick up, you’re rewarded a short phone call with the deceased person you wish to hear from most.
prints: X
And my mind immediately creates the scenario in which one knows the above and does not pick up the phone. Now there's a story.
derangedhyena reblogged
hahaha I'm dealing poorly actually
derangedhyena reblogged
I love how her smile just went supernova when he started singing!!
derangedhyena reblogged
Ever see a baby alligator get dizzy?
TOO GOOD AT SPINNING
how does this work fom like a physics standpoint like how do they do that
@snakefeathers this childe.
derangedhyena reblogged
A snake story, based on an experience I had while I was in Florida.
derangedhyena reblogged
big fan of when grief drives characters to do fucked up things that are ultimately pointless and do more harm than good rather than just like. going to therapy
